Forseeing the Prophet
by Audrey
Summary: Sydney, before he bore the name Losstarot, before he was the Prophet, before he even knew what the name Mullenkamp meant. A boy's journey, from the very beginning. Liberal backstory.
1. Default Chapter

**prologue: **

The sky was split into even rows of grey and plasticine blue- the boy touched it; it was his sky. Sometimes he felt like it called his name, but he wasn't sure. "You are mine," he said to that little expanse of something beyond the dead, beyond the rot. Just beyond the resonating ruin of Lea Monde. "I know not where you are," said the boy. "But you are mine."

***********************

The first place the boy saw the difference in him was in his footsteps. 

He saw the blotch that was his Nurse before she came. The dark smudge of her presence marred the pristine symmetrical lines of the Duke's Manor. The boy let his slim white legs carry him down the hill. His shaggy blonde hair brushed against his ears as he ran, whispered secrets to him. _Hsst.  
_"Young Master Bardorba!"  
He ran.  
"Your father beckons!"  
He arrived.  
"I know," he said in response to the words that slip't from those dry, cracked white lips. "I saw."  
_Shedidnotasktheyneveraskedshedidnotaskhowhesawhesawhowhesaw_...  
She crossed herself.  
"Well then tidy yourself up then." Around her wrists, thick clusters of rosary beads, like individual marbles of sin, clacked noisily. "And get your hair out of your face." Nurse's eyes shifted left. "'Tisn't proper."  
His smile was mild, was obedient, was calm, perchance...smug. "Nay madam," he said, his small head lowered. "'Tisn't proper at all."  
Unnerved, she turned around and slid forwards across the courtyard- the quasi glitter of a slug's trail. 

He followed her across the granite tiles, tightroping on spiderweb cracks that would never break his dead mother's back.   
Spiderwebs forever lead to spiders, and these cracks were no exception, branching to rejoin at a tarantula of a tile: an eight pointed red star upon cold granite. His toes magnetized to the spot. 

_Hsst._  
A voice.   
"Who goes there?"   
  
Further ahead, the Nurse walked on, oblivious.  
  
"Who speaks to me thus?" 

Whispers. And secrets. And the wind in his ears.  
Slowly, a smile crossed the boy's face. "Oh, it's just you again."   
_Hsst...lost...the...lossst...the ssstarot...  
_"Young Master Bardorba!"   
The emptiness fractured. The boy started. "Yes?"   
Nurse squinted suspiciously at him, rubbed the large overwrought cross in her hand to seek some further protection. "Hurry along, boy."  
She did not ask who he had been talking to. They never asked.  
"Nurse?" His eyes were cunning innocence, facet, refract.  
Her words and movements slammed together nervously like miniature seizures. "Yes, what is it, pet?"   
"What is the name of this woman?" He rested his small white hand reverently on the feet of the statue that stood regally beside him on a pedestal.  
The Nurse set her plump jaw and crossed her good Christian self once, twice, three times. "It's not for young boys' ears."  
"_Please_, Nurse," he insisted in a cool whisper. " _I only want to know._"   
  
If one wanted to, one could say that the cracks in the floor expanded, or tremored in that moment.  
  
The Nurse's round form wobbled. "That's the paganidolMullenkamp," she said quickly. "Don't dally in those cultist activities, they're a surefirepathtohell, away from the eyes of our LordFathertheProtector."   
"Oh, _aye_?" A pointed stare, gentle and eerie. "Hell?" He sounded truly enraptured. Clasping his small hands together in front of him, he remained silent for a minute, or 10. Then, "Proceed, Nurse."  
Still murmurring prayers beneath her breath, she walked on.   
The boy lifted a foot to follow, and here the revelation began.

  
He watched his nurse's feet pass innocuously through the corridor, trudging uneventfully through the gray, ineffective as a ghost's.   
But when this boy walked, the gray dispersed, terrified, and the shadows came pouring in from all sides, clinging like fingers to the soles of his feet. He could see them moving like small noiseless animals, creeping from corners and crannies to suck at his shoes in tendrils. The boy lifted one foot, and the shadows clung to it, viscous and black as a congealed sort of ink. He fell backwards in a silent panic. Awakened, his hair flew forwards before his face, flurried angrily. _Hsst. _

Branches of nothing split fault lines through his eyes. "Stop!"

The Dark disintegrated. 

*********************

The boy lay on the hill and touched his palm to the sky. When he removed his hand, he saw the black lines of the weeping willow snaking through the clouds malevolently, and he closed his eyes, restraining an inner shaking. He touched one pale hand to his lips, and pressed his fingertips back up to the taut canopy above him. "I wonder," he said, with his eyes still shut, "If they'll leave a mark."   
In a thunder rumble, his eyes opened and saw something flash in the sky: a lightning bolt, or a bird, or perhaps a rood.   
He rolled over and counted his numberless years on one hand. "3, 4, 12," he said.  
He stood up.  
His fingerprints, the ever-twining willows, remained ominously in the gray sky.  
The boy walked down the hill, but a pale speck in the vast graylands landscape.  
"12," he said.  
"It is time."

******************

Judgment is a table of old bearded noblemen.   
Eyes, eyes, burning, dancing eyes. Lined with the veins of old age and accusation. The boy saw the eyes and thought: I hope my eyes never look like that.   
His own, a sad, bleached gray, softly absorbed the heat of the room.   
"My son."  
"My liege."  
Sitting a bit apart from the rest, the Duke nodded solemnly in greeting. The rest quietly squirmed- _howmuchdoeshesee,really?_

"How fare you, my son?" said the old priest, stroking his grizzled beard. His immoveable stare cut into the boy's flesh like a knife.  
"I am well, Father Bernard, and you?"  
"Never mind that," said the Cardinal from his seat and scarlet garments, wryly. "We're here to talk about you."  
"Me?" The boy's slender chin lifted ingenuously. "All of you here-" He glanced about the room, at the many very-important sets of eyes. "For me?"  
A man in armor that the boy did not recognize leaned over the table to hiss at him. "As if you didn't know all we venture to say."  
"Now Cameron..." began the priest.   
  
In the shadowed corners, the Duke raised a hand to halt his protests, let the conversation continue.   
His son shot him a sudden look of a betrayed child's alarm.  
"Who speaks to you?" barked the man in the armor. "Are they ghosts, or witches? Spirits? Faeries?"  
"Do you regularly attend confession?" asked the priest with a smile that tried to mask the armored man's barking.   
"Perhaps the boy simply requires an exorcism," said the Cardinal, looking bored.   
The boy said nothing, sat obediently with his hands in his lap and would look at no one but his father. 

"Who speaks to you thus?" shouted the man in the armor. "I ask you, who is it?" His bellows shook the table, made the ancient bones of the noblemen in the room rattle.   
"Now Sir Cameron, is this really necessary?" posed the Cardinal halfheartedly in response to the noise.   
The priest, blind to all, smiled sickly once again at the boy. "have you accepted the Lord as your personal Savior?"  
The Duke did not look at his son.  
The boy spoke. "No."

If one wanted to, one could say the walls of the room contracted, or tensed, or breathed in that moment.  
  
"...what?"   
The old priest studied the boy. "Do you...Young man, do you know what you're saying?"  
The boy only laughed. "Oh Father, do you truly think that I can be saved?"

The Duke closed his eyes and his eyelashes were black with nothingness.   
There was a long and measured silence, broken only by old men's rasping breathing.  
  
"Very well," said the Cardinal, tiredly. The collective fear of those rumors, those whispers of cults, of a new coming, of the destruction of the old way-- that fear gathered like a stone and weighed heavily on the stomach of every man. "The council has decided on a proposal." He pounded a mallet that seemed to appear out of nowhere. "We propose that this boy, young Sydney Bardorba, be hereby outcast. Any opposed?"

Not even a _hsst_ in the soundlessness. 

The armored man took over, spoke severely, "You have 7 hours to leave the Manor and the graylands. You are to be stripped of your title and your birthright. You are exiled from your home and are forbid from trying to reclaim anything that may have been at one time your inheritance."  
The priest and his repulsive eyes tried to be comforting but only succeeded in being disgusting. "I would go pack now, boy."

But the boy would talk to and look at none but the Duke, still. "Father?"  
There was no response.  
"...Father?" And there was a bit more of a boy in his voice, a telltale wobble in the word.   
The response came slowly. "No longer am I your Father. Git thee gone, you are no longer a Bardorba."  
The Duke looked up, lips pressed together like a folded sheet of paper. "From this day forth, I have no son."

And with that, the boy walked out.

******************************************************

The boy stepped out onto the hill, and pointed at the sky, the glowing sky, the blue-streaked sky, the awful lying sky. "You are mine," he said. "I know not where you are, but I am coming." 

And he carried no name, no savior; his back was yet bare and white. But the voices still hid in the crook of his neck and in the dust of his long lashes and the curve of his boy's chin and they spoke to him. 

And he walked on, his footsteps trailing a thousand shadows behind him, black willow arms arching eternally through a pale gray sky.

So it began, the first story of the wanderer... the original vagrant. 

http://www.kuso.net


	2. 2

**2.**

The women of the inn pitied the boy, and they whispered among themselves that he was a wee fallen angel that their Lord God must've let slip through his enormous fingers, for the boy was small, and lost, and fair, and also because he had an odd way about him that was not of their humble village world.  
The innkeeper himself was quite another story. He despised the boy - for the free bowls of stew his wife snuck him, for the way the boy sat in the corner like a premature shadow, for the way his teenage daughter Samantha doted over him - but mostly because of the way the flames flickered in the boy's eyes when he warmed himself by the fire, and that strange ringing in the his quaint little voice when he spoke.   
"There's something not right with that'un," the innkeeper grumbled to his wife. " 'E'll bring naught but trouble to us."  
But the boy remained, sitting in his quiet corner of the inn. He did not pay for board (he slept in the barn), and he ate only what charity deigned to favor him with.   
For a while.   
  
13, Nurse had taught the boy, was an unlucky omen. 13, she had whispered, rosary beads tingling with superstition, smelled of the end of things.  
The boy was 13.  
  
This night was cool; the sky stained purple and pink, each cloud bleeding into the next, as the sky around those parts had a habit of doing. It had been many months since the boy had seen the blue over Lea Monde. The memory of the willow traced vague gray paths in the backs of his retinas, but in the fronts of his eyes was always pressed the image of high-rising mountains, of hills and of walls. This town was a self-contained valley. This valley was a purgatory.  
The boy arose from his bed in the barn, brushed the hay from his flaxen hair, and ventured out into the courtyard. He looked to his right, to his left, to the barricade before him, and he tiptoed. He twisted a halfway wistful smile. "Someday," he said to the blue sky.   
It did not hear him, but it was his. 

The boy returned to the inn and hid his dubious form in the nook of a corner, sat in his usual spot at the table. The dark draped over him and he pulled it close about him like a hood, like a cloak. The drab hue that sat in a cloak of dust about the inn washed away the painful blue of the faraway sky. The boy's attention turned to trace the footsteps of men, to listen to their conversations, to learn of their evils through the clack of heel and the shuffle of toe. He saw the judgment hanging upon the men even as the dark whispered apocalyptic fairy tales to him from between his bangs.   
"What are you looking at?"  
The boy looked up abruptly.  
Smiling down at him between twin blonde braids was the innkeeper's daughter, Samantha.   
The boy opened his mouth to tell her of the ending tide, and the willows, and the wide-spreading wings, but the room seemed to tremble as if to warn _no_, and the thick crowded air choked in his throat like a stopper.   
"Shadows," he said.  
The girl laughed as only a budding woman of 16 can laugh. "Plenty of those," she said, rumpling the boy's hair fondly. "What about them?"  
The boy looked down at the table he was sitting at, ran a finger up and down the grooves of the wood.  
"If your soul be forsaken," he said in a prophetic mumble, still shrill with the tremors of childhood, "or rejected or wounded, it will drag on the heels of men so that their shadows lengthen. In this way I can tell the good from the evildoing. In this way I can know the nature of a man. I can sense the doom."  
"And I?" Samantha teased, scowling her pretty face in an attempt to impersonate evil. "Does the dark drag at my shadow?"_  
_The boy looked at her. Her flaxen braid teased her neck like a noose. _  
She'll die_, the voices said. _She'll die she'll fall her back will break will split, will splinter. _They almost laughed as Sydney winced. _ Her justice will be to be stabbed in the back for love. The virtuous don't rise to heavenly heights; they crumble in the ruins of naivete. They bury, blind by the image of an angel. Tell her Losstarot, tell her her fate... tell her his name... it's on the tip of your tongue: Guildenster-   
_"You are a good girl," the boy said finally.   
Satisfied, she gave a laugh and flounced off. Then the boy was yet again alone, and the whispers, the coldness, the tingling blackness, crept back up his neck in fingers and caressed the line of his jaw like an old friend.   
_She is a good girl,_ the voices hissed from behind his ear. _But even the most devout can meet their ends in the Dark._  
"_Hsst," _shushed Sydney, banishing them back into the feathery recesses of his hair. He blinked to rid himself of the cacophonous notes of their words. "_I have no use for you."   
_He saw, but he did not wish to know. _  
_

Soon, the food the innkeeper's wife had snuck him sat heavily and contentedly upon the boy's stomach. The fire rose up from the hearth to his belly and the clamor of voices and ale mugs dulled to a single constant pressure upon his skull. The boy's eyes closed. The dreams began:  
The blood sang. "only to me, only to me," the boy found himself whispering. The blood sang and it vibrated as it came pouring in through the door and the windows. The men were swept up by it. They drowned in it. They all whispered her name when they died; it was stamped upon their lips. Only the boy, only he rose above it, pale and clean as always. As the blood washed up upon his feet and recoiled, as if frightened, he saw her: a figure in the door. She was robed; he could not see her face; she beckoned to him with a finger and all the Dark came galloping around her in a cyclone. She motioned with a graceful sweep of her arm out the door and the boy saw that the world was on fire. There was a man outside, stern, strong, and his eyes scorched the very ground black. Then she closed the door, and opened her mouth to sing once more. The room splintered. the blood shattered. The boy screamed.   
"FIRE!" 

The inn collapsed on itself into silence.   
"Where, boy?" drawled a nearby man with cheeks reddened by ale. "There's only fire in the hearth in here, and if that scares ye, then you're better off living in the Ruins."   
His companions laughed heartily. The boy lowered his head and said nothing, was interrupted in his persistence to say nothing by a youth who burst through the doors of the inn at that moment hollering. "Fire! In the Graylands, fire! If it isn't put out, it'll burn straight towards us. The Manor is in flames!"   
Judgment is a room full of eyes and mouths gargling wordless accusations.   
"The boy was here the entire time. There's no way he could've known about the Manor," a voice hissed from the back of the room.   
"He must've started it," snarled another.   
"Fools," said the innkeeper. And the room hushed for him. "Fools, how could he start a fire without moving? Nay, the boy did not cause the fire by his own two hands, unless he majicked it. His yell was by divination, lads."  
"But how? Why?" said the people of the inn, in cacophonous unison.   
"I'll tell you why," hissed the innkeeper, and his wife had no power to stop him. "The boy's a demon. He speaks to devils."  
The crowd roared in bloodthirsty approval.  
The boy whirled. He fell backwards. The people's eyes, swarms of wasps, bore into him. "I didn't-- I'm not-- I don't know what you're talking about, I..."  
Torches came from closets, storybook pitchforks. They drove the boy out of inn and valley and kept on chasing. If he had had time to stop running and think, the boy might have been a bit flattered that a mob had gathered for him. For _him_. A regular boy but for the occasional voices and the way he slept in fits. For him, the townspeople snarled; they hissed the name of the devil from between their teeth. Panting up the hill as he fled, kicking up slim ragged heels, Sydney laughed uneasily. It wasn't the devil they had to fear. 

  
"It is time," the Duke said to the statue of Mullenkamp.   
Smiling wolfishly, she agreed.

  
With the pitchforks grazing his bony spine, the boy did all that he could do- he ran straight into the maelstrom of the townspeople's fear, charged headlong into the manor and the fire and left them standing at the smoky edges yelling curses into a hell they would not, could not, understand. The boy was but young, and his small lungs tore at the air to claim something clean from amidst the plumes of smog. The tears that stung in his eyes were not a result merely of the heat or the smoke, but also of the familiar tracing of lines in the tiles that the boy crawled on. Because when his empty ashy body finally collapsed onto the cold alabaster tile, his cheek touched something like a red star-shaped tile, and the boy knew with a start that he was home.

"Only for you, my prophet, only for you," said a voice. Her voice.   
The robed woman, the beautiful woman of Sydney's dreams walked through the fire with the poise of a true goddess and gathered the boy's small frail form in her arms. "So small, so sweet, so young." She brushed his hair from his eyes, the Dark dripping from her fingers. "I would not have picked you, and yet-" She sighed. She placed him on the ground at her feet. Disrobed. She danced for him and the boy saw the yellow flames lick at her body and yet she did not burn. Then she reached out a hand and touched his back and then the burn came. How it came. He opened his mouth to yell but the Dark came flooding in through his mouth and eyes and ears and then he suddenly knew nothing.

The fire whirled and consumed its own fiery arms and then suddenly gasped and died. All that was left of it in the Manor were the ankle-deep ashes and the strange set of woman's footsteps that traced from the base of the statue to nowhere at all. And the pale body of a boy, curled like a crescent moon about its feet. The boy slept fitfully. For a while. 

When the moon shines bright upon the pale skin of your hand and alights the blood upon it with frightful florescence (_hiss: phosphorescence)_, one can't help wondering what's been lost. Sydney awoke and discovered that he'd lost the skin upon his back.   
It burned, oh it burned it burned. It burned as a little boy should never burn, it hurt with a pain that dug obscenely, perversely into his innocent white flesh. When he first pulled his lashes open, twilight melting cautiously into dawn, he was paralyzed by the pain that greeted him; his body automatically contorted into the fetal position, he pulled his slender legs to his stomach and tried to force a scream to let it out. At first his jaw locked, twitched with the shock of it all, and he could utter nothing. The screams came later, and in rapid succession.   


In some inner chamber of the manor that had been untouched by the fire, the infant Joshua slept. Beside him, solemn as tears, his father the Duke rocked in a chair, and read from a bible to block the sound of his brother's screams from the babe's ears.   
  
If you've ever wondered what sin sounds like, these screams were it. 

_"And Jesus said I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. but if it dies, it produces many seeds."_  
  
The boy would scream for his mother, but he never had one.  
  
_"The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life."_

He would scream for his father, but he had forsaken him.

_"Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you."_

He would scream for his God, but knew not what world he haunted. 

_"The man who walks in the dark does not know where he is going."_

For what kind of God would leave a boy of 13 to flail on the cold concrete ground of a home that is no longer his, his curse branded upon his back, the proof, the print of blood upon his twisted fingertips?

_"Put your trust in the light while you have it, so that you may become sons of light." _

So the boy called out to another...

_"For god so loved the world that he gave his only son..."_

To the only one he had left...

_"but no longer my only son, Joshua..."_  
  
Though he didn't even know her,  
  
_"no longer..."_  
  
Her name slipped naturally from his lips:

"MULLENKAAAAMP!" 

tbc.


	3. 3

3.  
  
From where he lay the boy thought he saw the hand of his father descend to brush back an ash-singed lock of hair from his forehead. In between cloaked visions, he imagined that the spectre of the Duke, in shades of fatherly brown and gray, had bent over him to plant a kiss upon the boy's cheek. And he remembered what it was like to have a home and a name, and he thought, here, maybe, there was something that would make this existence tangible. He thought he heard a baby crying. 

Then the sun seared whitehot and bleached his pupils dry and the boy realized his eyes were finally open.   
"...Hello?"  
Boots. Leather boots. The boy tried to say something in response but it came out a croak. Before he had time to rearrange his world, a pair of strong, capable hands were roughly sitting him upright and sloshing water down his throat. The excess dribbled down his chin and onto his shirtless chest.  
He looked straight in front of him with a dogged animal stare. The young man who stared back grinned broadly and took a knee. Bowed his head. "My Lord."  
The boy did not question his title. "And you are...?"  
"My name," the man said, an awed sort of joy in his voice, "is John Hardin."   
  
The boy rose, attempted to stand, wavered, but found support in the cold stone of the statue behind him. He examined Hardin, trying to spit out the acute sting of bitterness in his mouth. Because deep down inside, the boy had expected his savior to be his father. Instead he had a young man who still looked like a boy despite his beard and stature because of the shattering idealism in his features.   
"And whose Lord am I? Did the Duke send you?"  
Hardin laughed. "Oh, nay, no such man."   
The boy looked at the ground. "I thought not. Then whose?"  
"We call ourselves the followers of Mullenkamp."  
The boy looked up sharply. "That woman?"  
"The Goddess, yes. She sent me to find you here."  
"Ah, then you must be a prophet," said the boy softly.  
"Nay, I..." he blushed. "I hold no such great power. I know only what the others read from the scrolls. They sent me to find you here."  
"Why you?"  
Hardin looked slightly crestfallen. "Because it was destined."  
The boy composedly wiped away the tears that were rolling in clear streams down his cheeks for reasons he could not explain. "Strange sir, do you know my destiny?"  
"I do. The Goddess knows and tells all."  
The boy squared his shoulders and stood straight. "Then tell me this. Who is this Goddess, and what does she want with me and," he demanded regally, "_what_ is this pain in my back?"  
Sharp intake of breath, "So it is true..." Hardin wistfully examined the boy's back, the bloody mark, almost looking to touch it, but stopped at the boy's savage glare, one like that of a small animal, claws out, teeth, hsst. So he said, "All shall be revealed in time. Come."  


Suspiciously, but readily, the boy followed him. Together, they walked towards somewhere else.   
The boy reached out in the tall grass to let the swaying blades tickle his fingertips. He was truly leaving now, leaving the trees and the hill and the willows behind. He was going to find the blue sky.   
"Hardin?"   
"Yes?"  
"That city...with the blue sky over it and the ancient smoke leaking from its rooftops...what is it called?"  
"Ah," said Hardin, with a knowing, destined smile. "LeaMonde."  
And the sky had a name. 

*****************  


_"Father, tell the story, the story of the city and the goddess and the cultists. The one with the undead and the Kildean sacrifice and the..."  
"Alright my son, alright. I will tell it."_  
  
Once upon a time there was a fair city and she was called Lea Monde: _the world_. She had 4 walls and they were hewn of the cleanest alabaster stone. The architects cut the stone to perfection; workers made churches and palaces and marketplaces of such gleaming artistry to stop your breath in your throat. All the most beautiful maids resided in Lea Monde. They waved their kerchiefs of satin and silk out their windows to blow their heroes' colors _(tea rose, burgundy, malachite)_ in the cool wind while they hummed songs from the old world. The city tasted of the faraway sea. 

But in the soil of Lea Monde was the blood of a great and ancient power. For a thousand years the city had slept undisturbed, unsated. In the dark days, the Kildeans had sacrificed their bodies to her, their young, their limbs. She drank their blood thirstily and they worshiped her, calling her Goddess, keeper of the Dark, their _Mullenkamp_. Then, one day, the Kildeans: their people, their city, their intricate rites.... simply.... disappeared. And the city was left alone and slumbering until the people of Lea Monde came and built upon her ruins. 

Then one day, someone awoke the angry soils. Cross-bearing armies of men, men foreign to the gentle people of Lea Monde, men who knew how to swear their allegiances to names like "The Parliament" and "The Cardinal" came. They spilt fresh red blood upon the earth and the ancient city awoke, its appetite aroused. It was hungry. But the people of Lea Monde did not know sacrifice, they were no Kildean cultists. Nay, and the name Mullenkamp as strange to their lips as the garbled sounds of babes. The city was hungry; no one fed the Dark; so it took its own homage. Ravenous, the very ground of the city opened up and swallowed its people alive, taking corpse after unwilling corpse in a gluttonous sacrifice to itself. And the Parliament called this "an earthquake." 

After the earthquake Lea Monde fell silent. No one sang songs, no one bothered to cultivate beauty. Alabaster walls fell under the shaded sway of grit and rot. The Cardinal's men came and left, taking their sullied banners with them. Then, under the cover of Dark, like a swarm of ants, _they_ came pouring over the land, reclaiming it. The Kildeans. For centuries the cultists had hidden deep in the underbowels of the city, whispering the name of Mullenkamp into dark corridors and basements just to hear the echo. And now, now the Dark was stronger than ever. Now was Her time. She had awoken and they needed only the prophet their scrolls had promised them to lead them. So in the shadows of Darkened LeaMonde the cultists still crouch; there they wait for their revelation, anticipating the prophet's day with the breathless hope that with him will come the Goddess and she will make their centuries of pain worth the bearing. 

  
*************************

The boy and Hardin stopped at a hole in the ground. The boy sniffed distastefully, looking around him. The air was dry, the undead trees naked and crippled by neglect. The wine cellar below him stunk of decay. But the boy looked to the sky named LeaMonde with something akin to new hope reflecting strips of robinegg blue into his pale eyes.  
Hardin said, "I am to take you underground."  
And he did.   
The Dark was overwhelming at first. It swooped at the boy's head ecstatically, frighteningly, like a plethora of boneless bats. The boy felt the familiar cling of shadows at his feet, fingers of inky black prying about his ankles and slim white calves. It took him a while to realize that half the hands he felt pulling at him were human. Then someone brought a lantern, and the boy saw a hundred glinting eyes in a hundred bowed heads, and they all of them wanted to touch him. And the dust was cool under his feet, and he suddenly turned to see Hardin's gold eyes gazing at him, looking proud-- the look exalted him. And though the lips of his new disciple were shrouded by the Dark, the boy felt the weight of his hand on his shoulder, and he could tell that he was smiling as he said,  
"Welcome to your Kingdom, Sydney Losstarot, Prophet of the Kildean Goddess, Leader of the Cultists Mullenkampf." 

TBC.  
_(anyone ever notice that LeaMonde mixed up is Lemonade?)_


	4. 4

4.

hard to say, really when the light ceased to illuminate when he choked on his own flame  
you who walk in flat white desert and solitary canyons here, shadows once lay dark and blue  
stretching long-armed to distant vanishing points... now his voice gets caught in the crannies  
his own whisper echoes telling him: watch your shadow watch it watch it  
watch: your perspective crawls without horizon

  
*******  
A series of uncountable years passed. Sydney's followers grew in number and assembled below the slab of rock he called his home: half ruin, half cave. A pale, small fist smashed down violently upon a sundial, shattering it into a hundred concrete pieces to bake in the glaring twilight of LeaMonde. The junior prophet smiled through his hair at his followers, and bowed.   
They applauded.   
Pale hands upraised and beating together in unison, they looked to snatch the prophet and pull him down into their fervor. Such are the trials of leading. Up on his craggy mount, Sydney looked down on the million below, and realized that at least half of all those uplifted faces were waiting for him to fall. Smiling with open mouths and gleaming teeth, sharklike, just waiting for the moment when the leader would topple.   
His smile faded away.   
A touch at his shoulder- "My Lord?"   
Hardin.  
Sydney stared down his nose at the crowd. "They all want it for themselves, you know. They'd almost kill me for it, if they weren't so scared." He licked his red lips. "I can taste their greed."  
Hardin cheerfully stated, "I wouldn't. I'm your lifelong servant, remember? Ordained."   
Sydney sighed. "Lifelong."  
Hardin gently rapped Sydney's shins with the flat side of his sword, reprimandingly. "It will be long."  
The prophet shook his head. "No. No it won't. It wasn't meant to be." He looked straight at Hardin with his queer pale eyes. "But you knew that."  
Hardin swallowed and twirled his sword thoughtfully behind him. Sydney was right, was always right. Deep in thought, he lost control of the sword and sent it clattering to the ground.  
Sydney laughed despite himself, but immediately felt bad for it. He pulled Hardin with him into the protection of his shadow. "Tell me about your brother, Hardin." The prophet crossed his legs deftly as he took a seat on the ground, looked up towards Hardin expectantly.   
Half a moment of surprise crossed through Hardin's eyes, then dissolved into the brown. "He was a sweet boy," he said softly. "He loved to play with the bugs. While I was still in the Peaceguard, before he... I used to make him little wooden beetles with joints in their legs, and he'd march them around the floor in rows."   
And Sydney could only think of one toy he'd ever had in childhood, the toy he possessed even now: Dark, clotting in cobalt marbles at his fingertips. "You miss him?"  
Head lowered, Hardin nodded.  
"You feel guilt?"  
Assent.   
Sydney closed his eyes. "He had coarse blonde hair, was but half your age, always gangly and a bit sickly- a... a gap between his front teeth. Wore floppy leather sandals he wouldn't let you get rid of." He opened his eyes again. "He had your smile."  
Hardin didn't need to raise his head; Sydney could feel the emotion rising like a blush from him, something between terror and worship.   
The prophet leaned over and lifted his friend's head with one hand, cupping his chin. "I'm getting more powerful, aren't I?"   
Hardin nodded rapidly.   
Sydney whispered into his ear, "Tell me what my little drones are buzzing about."  
Lips moving without his volition, "They say they've found new writings. They've deciphered further and... and you are not the last. The Rood Inverse will be passed on because you are... you are but the vessel and after you will come another who will bear the Mark..." Hardin closed his mouth with a little gasp and looked up at Sydney, hurt. He would have spoken anyways.   
Sydney sat back, satisfied, and hummed to himself a bit. Sang to the Dark. Then stood up. "A test of myself, dear Hardin, not of you."  
He walked back to the cliff, and once more, the cultists looked upwards towards him in anticipation. "So they want me dead for my Mark..." Sydney whispered violently under his breath. He raised his hands above his head in an orant pose. "Forget!" said the prophet of Mullenkamp in a voice that rung over the rocks and drove into each hooded cultist head like a stake. Slowly, the greed and ambition drained out of every face until all that was left was a dull obeisance.   
Slowly, creepingly, Sydney smiled once more. "That's more like it."

****************  


The night sky, with its secret smiles and hidden acts of furious love, was a manuscript: glorious illuminated ink upon rolls and rolls of deepest velvet. And every star was an open mouth, and from them poured the story of a destiny Sydney often wished he could not know. And along the highways and byways of the Dark opened wide by the night, Sydney could scry far and well, catching snatches of conversations not yet said, and snippets of names that would one day be important. _rosen- _hsss. _grisso-_hsss. _ joshhhhjossshhhjosshh_hsss_. _Yet one name made itself recklessly known. It stood in prominence with no shame or question. "Ashley Riot," said Sydney out loud to the emptiness of his private tent, and for the first time, this night the name answered with an image. 

"his shoulders are brown and wide and strong. and his shoulders are brown and wide and strong! and his shoulders are brown. and wide. and strong."

Then the shoulders turned, and revealed a face, and the lips, so familiar in their complete strangeness said, "Let me show you your end."

The skin Sydney's back burned.

****************  


The faithful disciple heard a muffled something from the tent of his Lord that was not his typical mumbling of divination. So Hardin ventured to lift the flap of the tent and peer in at the boy sitting comatose on the dirt-- his eyes glazed and incendiary, his aura and scent dirty with fear.  
"Sir?"   
The prophet heard him (he heard everything) but did not heed.   
Hardin would've reached his hand through eternal fire to protect the boy, would've thrown his body into the jaws of a wyvern. But tonight, tent flap held in hand staring dumbly, he had nothing to say or do.  
He left the torch in its stand and closed the tent.   
Hardin looked to the bleak night sky and mouthed a simple question--  
Hardin asked the stars why; they did not answer his blind eyes; he was no prophet; his lord had been crying; they fell and faded; their lord had been crying; so they cried too. 

In his tent, all alone, the boy curled his arms around his knees and stared into the fire. He dreamed of a knight that would kill the damsel. He dreamed of a hero that would demolish the castle. He dreamed of the end. 

It made him smile.  


****************  


In the morning the prophet shed the last of his boyhood like a discarded skin and tossed it over the cliff. With long limbs nude and white, he scaled the mount until his fingers could grab hold of the sky: milky blue dreamstuff resting in his palms. He formed himself a pair of wings from it, made a promise to it that he would be back- "after he's claimed it and I am free." He attached the wings to his bony shoulders, fastened them with a destined dream. Then he jumped.

  
****************  


The lark made no exceptions for prophets and demigods. The sun rose once more and the world stirred, impatient.  
"My lord." Hardin gently shook his liege awake.  
Sydney opened his eyes, and they were clear, fearless, and coldly void of color.  
"It is good that you have awoken me, Hardin. We must prepare. LeaMonde is to receive guests."

_poem by Ndi_


End file.
